Meet the Team
Built by operators
for operators.
We built New Circle after decades of paying the retainers, running the internal gauntlet anyway, watching searches drift, and living the real cost of a compromised hire: lost time, broken momentum, and cultural debt that takes quarters to unwind.
New Circle is the alternative to recruiter-led search. A decision-driven hiring system run by operators, built to create clarity before outreach, evidence before opinion, and a hire-or-no-hire conclusion you can stand behind.
Emma Lisa Lesica
Senior talent acquisition and search leader with 20+ years advising leadership teams on executive hiring, workforce strategy, and organizational health. A founding member of Daversa Partners, she helped launch and scale the firm's retained executive search practice across technology verticals, partnering with clients on role definition, compensation strategy, and end-to-end search execution. She later served as Vice President of Client Solutions at EssentialDx, a subsidiary of Alioth—one of the first executive search firms to embed AI into the search process, specializing in life sciences—where she worked with executives on data-driven culture and workforce diagnostics to improve readiness, retention, and hiring outcomes.
Henry Nothhaft, Jr.
Operator and innovator who has spent 15 years building and scaling AI-native software companies from ideation to scale. Formerly an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI International's AI Center where he founded Trapit, an early AI media personalization platform. Later headed product at Clear Labs, a groundbreaking life sciences company delivering fully automated next-generation sequencing and software-driven insights across food safety, infectious disease, and oncology research. Went on to join the founding team and served as President and COO of Alioth (Hunt Scanlon Top 40 Search Firm, Inc. 5000), one of the first executive search firms to embed AI into the search process, specializing in life sciences, and its subsidiary EssentialDx, an organizational culture and executive talent acquisition platform.
Tommy Ziemer
Operator-methodologist who built the diagnostic and decision frameworks that New Circle runs on. As Head of Product and Head Methodologist for Alioth and EssentialDx—one of the first executive search firms to embed AI into the search process, specializing in life sciences—he created practical systems for diagnosing organizational culture and improving hiring decisions, then partnered with executive teams to turn those insights into processes organizations could actually run. A trained mediator, his ability to surface root issues, build alignment across stakeholders, and move high-stakes discussions to clear decisions is central to the New Circle approach. He brings 20 years of experience building and scaling product and engineering organizations.
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